Proof: Why Mods Are Ace

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Are you listening, Blizzard? ARE YOU? Here are three minutes of why PC gamers deserve the option to alter their games, and why the world is a better place for it. Madness, beauty, comedy, juggling, land-swimming, flying horses and most of all modding await you in this completely, gloriously batshit Oblivion machinima.

Why am I posting it? Why didn’t I post it sooner, more like.

That was The Silly Adventures of Mr. Mochi, it’s by theninjacowboy, it meant nothing whatsoever, but I liked it anyway. Via the peerless peers that are Reddit.

Thanks guys! Also, very happy you chose the screenshot you did. It came out darker in the video than I would have liked and was hoping people could still take it all in, as it’s also my favorite scene. There’s also a lot I had to cut out to fit 3 minutes so you can count on seeing more whimsical adventures. One involves a bear wearing a top hat.

But the unique selling proposition inherent to Blizzard’s new envelope-pushing solution promotes blue sky thinking by landing and expanding their position as a leading provider of state of the art online synergy.

Do you think a end user perspective end-around and the ability to pick the low-hanging fruit is compatible with that?

Well that… is really fucking stupid. Has this man who transformed Ratchet into a Liefeldian monstrosity beyond human comprehension no respect for good character design and proper proportions? This is just… just… ugh. It’s retarded.

I think i’ve expended my stupidity quota for today in two and a half seconds. Forehead, meet concrete wall.

Don’t you guy see it? He’s not an PC elitist jerk as we are, he’s an literal elitist jerk. This puny video of distortion is far below him. Mods, pah. He does not need them. Mods are for people that want to have fun.
But Morte does not play games for the fun, no. He play’s so he can show what an elitist jerk he is. Also, he’s only visiting RPS to snort at people having fun.
Also, his favourite game is the Streetcleaning Simulator.

To be honest, Oblivion is as much an advert as to why mods are bad as it is for why they’re good.

Modding communities are perverted and lore-breaking beyond belief, and I stopped modding my games because I got absolutely sick of having to trawl through pages of Anime costumes, sex mods, BDSM outfits and other ridiculous crap to find the ONE mod that might work.

If there is one good mod you like, they’ve already proven their worth. Free, completely optional material? You can pick out the lore-faithful, the perverted sex romps, whatever. I can’t see it ever argued they’re truly a negative. Maybe in crazy land where you must install every single one, even the ones that contradict others.

I’d argue for sites with better organization and searchability… Most mods, like most books, TV shows, etc. are utter crap.

Isn’t that a bit like saying that we shouldn’t play games because a lot of games are bad? If you don’t want to figure out which mods are good, then you are free to not bother, but for the rest of us, the good mods are very rewarding.

I seriously think the real issue is with the main Oblivion mod website. And Pointless, in my experience the top 100 are still the ones voted up by the regular community — which means most of them are slender anime-girly outfits. A quality lore-friendly set of armor suits remains hidden beneath a couple of hundred chainmail bikinis.

Of course, there are ‘best of’ lists elsewhere, and those help. But it’s still a hairy, frustrating field. Hopefully with Skyrim we can see some better forms of organization. Lord knows I’d love to just gather up all the lore-appropriate content additions and tie them together.

Are you talking about the Nexus? Because just in the Top 25 I see Trade and Commerce, OBMM, BOSS, Wrye Bash, Darnified UI, the Midas Magic overhaul, Unofficial Oblivion Patch, Elsweyr, OBGE, Better Cities, TES4Edit, and Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch. Pretty much some of the most important mods there are to be had in Oblivion.

Yes, there’s anime/fetish crap, even in the Top 25. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I AM saying it’s really not hard at all to find the good stuff. I know it’s all vote-based, but it still pretty much works. It’s not like you have to sift through hundreds of the things, it’s just a small list and the non-fetish-crap is pretty easy to spot.

@Pointless Puppies
I’ve just gone on and looked at the top 25. 12 of them, at the very least, were either lore-breaking, overtly sexual and/or didn’t fit the visuals of the game. And, of the 12 I saw, 3 of them were also blocked as Adults Only.

Looking at the top 100 (non-adult), they’re mostly either tech and/or UI fixes and utilities (Like OMOD), visual enhancements or lore breaking crap (Lich King armour from Warcraft? Seriously?). It’s so hard to find high quality, lore-friendly mods that don’t make my character look like a stripper from an anime flick.

You’re completely right! When I was a little kid I turned on my radio only to find Bon Jovi blasting out of the stereo. I thereby concluded that all music must be inherently bad, and I have therefore stopped listening to all music whatsoever. In fact, our governments did a fine job when they decided to ban all sound from our good planet!

I can never look at Oblivion the same way again, knowing that there is a sizable portion of the community who believe it is a noble goal to turn the game into a Final Fantasy rape simulator. Granted, I was aware of them previously, but actually seeing their dark and terrible spewings has made it all the worse.

I’d argue against that. As much as I hate the quality of Bethesda’s quality control when it comes to the technical aspects of their games, namely how often they crash or how many bugs they launch with, there’s a lot more I find to love in their games than in Blizzard games as of late. I’ve felt wrapped up in the worlds of Oblivion and Fallout 3 while I played them and while I would get angry at the crashes, it’s only because I enjoyed the experience enough that I hated being taken away from it if just for a minute.

Blizzard doesn’t release games often enough to judge but I haven’t felt any passion for a game since I first played WoW five years ago. Experiencing the world for the first time was incredible and back then, I might have agreed with you. But I’ve gone through three expansions of that now and Starcraft 2 and the conclusion I’ve drawn is that I couldn’t care less about their games now. Sure they’re polished but they lack a lot of soul. I’d take the game that crashes but makes me feel something over the one that doesn’t but gives me nothing any day.

BUT that’s a huge aside from the video posted, which was awesome and made my day brighter.

Should I counter your completely subjective opinion with my own completely subjective opinion, in the finest argumentative, battle-ready traditions of the Internet? Or should I point to the fact that they’re still trading, still making screeds of money, as all the argument needed to overturn your clearly biased statement? You choose.

I am increasingly convinced that these sorts of decisions re: mods are not made by people who actually enjoy games, or whose primary goal is to make a game that contributes to the world in any way, or for whom any argument that mods make the world a better/happier/sillier/pick-your-adjective place holds sway. The decision is made because they didn’t think about it until after they’d built tech that didn’t easily support it, or to save on time/budget, or most likely because their whole real-money auction house idea goes down the shitter if people can mod in anything they want. There are certainly plenty of people at Blizzard who care about games and who would love nothing more than for their game to support mods, but they are not the ones making the decisions, because to rise to a certain level in the industry you have to stop caring about games in that peculiarly passionate way that is utterly divorced from how much money they can make you.